Monday, November 30, 2009

The Royal Gazette now starts with publishing the constituencies for the municipal council elections in the municipalities newly created this year. Even though so far it were only a few of them covered so far, there were already two municipalities I did not find in the board meeting transcripts.

On the site with the board meeting transcripts a few meetings are still lacking, especially number 19, 21, and 28 to 30 of board one are probably the ones which contain more municipality upgrades. And if these had the same agenda size of about 12 like the others, this would mean I still have 60 municipalities not yet in my lists.

While Pattaya was made a special administrative area in 1978 in order to make the administration more able to cope with problems from the strong growth of tourism in the town, Laem Chabang is an industrial center and especially the main port of Thailand. However, this proposal obviously wasn't successful, but I haven't seen any report on why it was dropped or at least postponed.

Laem Chabang thus still is a subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลแหลมฉบัง), and is somewhat special is it one of the very few municipalities which cover area from more than one district. It covers parts of subdistrict Bang Lamung in Bang Lamung district, and of Si Racha district the complete subdistricts Bueng, Sura Sak, Thung Su Khla and parts of Nong Kham. And despite the fact that it already has a high enough population and probably also enough tax income, it is still at the lowest municipality level.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Last week the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA) issued another report on the ongoing creation of the 878th district Galyani Vadhana in Chiang Mai. While most part of the announcement is just the repetition of previously noted facts, like the name being bestowed by HM the King in July, and that the cabinet approved the creation in October. The new information is at the bottom

Right now, the province Chiang Mai is preparing the area for the district office already. It will be in the area of village 2, subdistrict Chaem Luang, Mae Chaem district, Chiang Mai province and covers an area of 82 rai 2 ngam 39 tarangwa (132,156 m²). For temporary use the building of the Tambon Council Ban Chan and the auditorium of the Center of Arts, located within the temple compound of Wat Chan, in Village 3 of Ban Chan subdistrict.

Using the map on the website of TAO Chaem Luang the location of the new district office will be in the northernmost village of this subdistrict, close to the border to Ban Chan subdistrict. Sadly Google Earth/Maps has no high resolution imaginary of the whole area of the new district, but in the Thai clone PointAsia it shows. But for the exact location of the future district office I still have no idea.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

While reading the book Thaksin : the business of politics in Thailand on the political system of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, one short section fits into the topic of this blog. It is on the spread of party politics into the local elections. In the past, the political parties in Thailand were only active in the national elections, while in the local elections for the municipal or provincial councils it had only local groups without any official party label or affiliation.

In 2003, local teams started to use the TRT (Thai Rak Thai) party label, though the party had the policy of not running in local elections. This policy was lifted by party leader Thaksin in December 2003, so the PAO elections in early 2004 were the first to have widespread use of party labels. Also, the interest in these elections grew a lot, since the budget and tasks of the PAO was increased a lot - for example local road construction and other infrastructure development was transferred to the authority of the PAOs.

Though the party label was used in these elections, in several provinces it had more than one group using the label of the same party, the major parties did not hav a team in every province, and teams without party affiliation were also running. The results were

Thai Rak Thai: 47 provinces

Democratic Party: 13 provinces

Chat Thai: 5 provinces

Chat Phatthana: 2 provinces

Independent: 7 provinces

Strangely, this sums up to 74 provinces, but there are 75 PAO as Bangkok does not have one. The book also displays a map which I have redrawn, but this is also fauly - Bangkok is drawn as a TRT province despite having no PAO, and the province of Samut Songkhram is missing in the map completely. As I don't have the source data used to create that map I simply left Samut Songkhram empty same as Bangkok. For the 2008 PAO elections I don't know any results by party, except that unsurprisingly Surat Thani remained a Democratic Party stronghold.

Like all the Muban creation announcements, it only contains the demarcation in words but no map. The description states that the new Muban 11 to the east borders Muban 6, so it is the western part which is split off. The website of the Tambon administrative organization has no map of its villages, so I can only approximate the location of the new village. And sadly the high resolution imaginary in Google Earth stop just at around the southern boundary of this new village.

Strangely it is just one single announcement, unlike the previous years when it always were a lot of creations in a row. For example in 2007, each time it were around 30 announcements published in the same day.

Monday, November 23, 2009

When I noticed the Excel sheets with the names of the administrative villages (Muban), I wrote that those are apparently compiled by DOPA to be checked with the local entities. I am right now slowly working through the TAO to add the URL of their website to my XML, and if they have a Muban list on it add that as well. I presume they should know the names best, yet by an automatic comparison with the DOPA list I noticed there are quite a lot of differences, though mostly minor spelling things.

I now came across one example where I even have four different names for the same Muban - in Tambon Bang Muang (ตำบลบางม่วง), Ban Yai district, Nonthaburi province.

In the Royal Gazette announcement on the creation of village 15 in 2004, two villages are mentioned: village 6 as the village to be split is named Ban Bang Som Phatthana (บ้านบางโสนพัฒนา) and the new village 15 is named Ban Bang Som Phatthana 2 (บ้านบางโสนพัฒนา ๒)

ThaiTambon.com does only list the 14 villages, so dates from before 2004, and names village number 6 as Ban Bang Som (บ้านบางโสน)

And the DOPA XLS sheet has it village 6 as Ban Bang Muang (บ้านบางม่วง) and village 15 as Ban Bang Som Phatthana (บ้านบางโสนพัฒนา)

And it's not just these two villages which have different names in the different sources - while the 2004 Gazette announcement only lists those two villages (and the surrounding ones), another Gazette announcement from 1998 has another version of the names. I have put it into a table for better comparison:

No.

TAO

ThaiTambon

DOPA

1998

1

บ้านปรางค์หลวง

บ้านบางค้อ

บ้านบางค้อ

บ้านบางม่วง

2

-

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านหลังวัดพิกุลเงิน

บ้านบางม่วง

3

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

4

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

5

บ้านคลองบางโสน

บ้านบางโสน

บ้านคลองบางโสน

บ้านบางโสน

6

บ้านบางโสนน้อย

บ้านบางโสน

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางโสน

7

บ้านบางค้อ

บ้านหัวคูใน

บ้านหัวคูใน

บ้านหัวคูใน

8

บ้านหัวคูนอก

บ้านหัวคูนอก

บ้านหัวคูนอก

บ้านหัวคูนอก

9

บ้านบางกร่าง

บ้านบางกร่าง

บ้านตานิ่ม

บ้านบางกร่าง

10

บ้านนาคเกี้ยว

บ้านนาคเกี้ยว

บ้านนาคเกี้ยว

บ้านนาคเกี้ยว

11

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

12

บ้านคลองยายจับ

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านบางม่วง

13

บ้านคลองขวา

บ้านบางม่วง

บ้านคลองขวา

บ้านบางม่วง

14

บ้านคลองลัด

บ้านคลองลัด

บ้านคลองลัด

บ้านคลองลัด

15

บ้านขุนเจน

-

บ้านบางโสนพัฒนา

-

Even those who cannot read Thai can see that only the villages 3, 4, 8, 10, 11 and 14 have the same name in all sources. The many differing names shows the necessity of the creation of a list with the official names, the task for which the DOPA Excel files were created.

Friday, November 20, 2009

On Youtube I found the video below, which shows the construction of the new office building for the TAO Maluan (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลมะลวน), Phunphin district, Surat Thani province. Though I cannot understand the soundtrack - my Thai is sadly still too bad - I can guess that it includes the meeting of the TAO council deciding on the new building, and I can understand that in the end it gives some background on the subdistrict itself, like listing the neighboring subdistricts and the villages.

The TAO was created in 1997 (Gazette), though actually it was already a TAO 1958-71 (Gazette). The subdistrict is much older, the oldest announcement mentioning it is from 1939. Sadly ThaiTambon.com has no more information on its history either.

The subdistrict is subdivided into 9 villages, and as of 2008 it has a population of 7479. It covers an area of 77 km². The subdistrict is located in the northwestern corner of Phunphin district, neighboring subdistricts are

The name of the subdistrict originates from Ma Luang (ม้าล้วง), meaning "horse digged out", as a marble horse statue with Khmer inscription was digged out in a temple opposite the TAO office. Therefore also the seal of the TAO feature a horse as the main symbol. But no hires version available on the website to create a decent SVG version of it.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

In case you want to fully use the data on the administrative entities I collected in XML, or the programming I did around that, you can download the whole thing to your computer and compile it yourself - and if you like even work in either the code or the data and then commit your changes into the global repository, so I can use them as well. The easiest way to join is to do exactly like I work, though especially if you just want to work on the XML there are other options as well. And if you just want to edit in the XML files, you don't need to be a programmer, and that can even be done with a plain text editor or on computer without Microsoft Windows. If you want to take a look first, you can do that online as well - the most interesting parts are the Royal Gazette announcements roughly sorted by topic and the data on the administrative entities, one file per province.

So to have this on your computer, first you need to download two programs - Microsoft's Visual Studio Express C# Edition which is both a quite good XML editor, as well as obviously the compiler for the program code I created. The second one is TortoiseSVN, the software which handles the download of the code from the repository and optionally the upload of your changes.

Once you installed both, you need to download the data first. Open the Explorer, go to the folder My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects and do a right click on the mouse. In the popup menu select "SVN Checkout"

To download the project anonymously, you have to use the URL

http://tambon.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

You will then get all the files into the folder you just selected.

If you plan to submit changes into the repository as well, you'll need to download the project with the URL

http://tambon.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

(note the https instead of the http), and then when prompted enter your Google user name and the password you find at this Google code page.

However to really submit changes you made, you also need to email me and give me your Google account name, as I have to manually add you to the list of project members.

To update your local files with those in the repository, open the popup menu on the project folder and choose "SVN update". If you have done any changes in the local files which you want to share, then you can choose "SVN Commit", choose the files you want to submit, enter a good comment on what you changes, and provided you have write access it will then be available to everyone.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

In an earlier example, I showed one subdistrict municipality where the boroughs (Chumchon, ชุมชน) and the administrative villages (Muban, หมู่บ้าน) coincide one-to-one. Now I have come across another different case, this time it has villages split into several chumchon, thus the local administration is giving the subdistrict more subdivisions than it has in the central administration.

The subdistrict municipality is Phum Riang (เทศบาลตำบลพุมเรียง), which covers the whole same-named subdistrict in the east of Chiaya district, Surat Thani province. The central town is most famous for its silk production.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Last week I wrote on the sixth amendment of the Tambon Council and Tambon Administrative Organization act, removing the limit of two consecutive terms for the TAO chairman. Now amendments for the acts covering the other local administrative units have been published in the Royal Gazette, all replacing previous regulations with the simple statement that the term of the chairman is four years starting from election day.

The only remaining local government unit is the city of Bangkok. According to Wikipedia, the governor also has only two consecutive terms, but it seems this will not get changed now - the announcement on the creation of a committee to discuss the amendments published in January does not mention the BMA.

Monday, November 16, 2009

When I worked through the DOLA geocodes for the local administrative units (LGUs), there were several cases where the code lists contains outright mistakes, or even more interesting cases where the numbers don't follow the logical system otherwise used. Especially these deviations from the system would be worth some further research, these might point to some interesting things still hidden. But it seems I would only be able to find out more by getting into contact with someone who actually worked on the creation of these numbers.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Since I covered the other changes in the Catholic church of Thailand, I now also mention the last of the bishops beyond the retirement age has found a successor. Bishop George Yod Phimphisan (ยอร์ช ยอด พิมพิสาร) was bishop of Udon Thani since 1975. Now aged 76 and therefore before the normal retirement age of 75 according to Canon 401 § 1, he now was the oldest bishop in Thailand and the only one beyond retirement age. The next oldest one is Archbishop Louis Chamniern Santisukniram of Thare and Nonseng at age 67, so this would be last such announcement for at least the next 8 years.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Again I noticed an emblem of a local government unit which uses Thai letters distorted so they are hardly anymore recognizable. If you look at the emblem, one needs to use quite some imagination to notice that those two white shapes in top are in fact the Thai letters Ko Kai (ก) and Wo Waen (ว).

The emblem is from the subdistrict municipality Krawan (เทศบาลตำบลกระหวัน), Khun Han district, Sisaket province. However the URL (www.abtkrawan.ob.tc) still originates from the time before the TAO Krawan was upgraded to a municipality in July 2008. In fact, the colored version of the emblem I found in a PDF linked from the website, and in this the emblem of the TAO is still used. But actually the two version of the emblem only differ in the text in the bordure, which changed from "อบต.กระหวัน" to "เทศบาลตำบลกระหวัน".

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Published in the Royal Gazette on November 6 was the 6th amendment of the Tambon council and Tambon administrative organization act (พระราชบัญญัติสภาตำบลและองค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล ฉบับที่ ๖). Since only one point in the long legal text was changed I tried to translate it and document the change here.

The part removed with this amendment is the limit of serving only two consecutive terms, thus a maximum of eight years since each time between two election is considered a term, even if the term was then shorter than four years.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

While looking for the list of administrative villages (Muban) on the website of the TAO Na Roek (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลนาเริก), Amphoe Phanat Nikhom, Chonburi province, I instead found the maps of the Muban. At first look nothing special, but once I checked the map of Mu 12 (Ban Ko Klang) a strange thing showed. This Muban consists of 5 areas not connected with each other, or if one considers the largest of these areas as the main one this Muban has four exclaves.

To better show the issue I have worked some time with Inkscape and created a vector map of the Muban in this subdistrict. Since I haven't found the Muban names in a table, I confirmed the names from the DOPA Excel sheet with those names on the map.

In those districts where only one new subdistrict was created the new code was of course evident, but funnily also for the other districts they followed the same order which they were originally entered on the Thai Wikipedia.

However, only these subdistrict codes were added - the new codes which will be necessary with the forthcoming creation of Galyani Vadhana district are not yet included. Don't know if they wait till the district is actually created, or it means that the creation will still take some more time.

Monday, November 9, 2009

In a German blog I found the reference to the new Google Guru, which is only available in Thai (and now also in Arabic). I took a look for questions concerning Tambon or Amphoe, and among several questions "How many Amphoe in Province XYZ", one question around Amphoe was really interesting.

อำเภอในประเทศไทยมีกี่ชั้น แต่ละชั้นใช้เกณฑ์อะไรในการแบ่งชั้น
How many levels of Amphoe in Thailand, and what are the criteria for each level?

While I heard about the different levels of the Subdistrict Administrative Offices (TAO), I did not know about the district having different levels - except the minor districts (King Amphoe), which until they were all upgraded in 2007 were a lower class of districts.

So naturally I tried to find a list of the levels and which Amphoe belong to which level. However it seems there's hardly anything online on these levels, the only tabular thing I found was a PowerPoint presentation from 2004, in which it has the following table

Special districts (อำเภอชั้นพิเศษ): 17 districts

Level 1 districts (อำเภอชั้น 1): 161 districts

Level 2 districts (อำเภอชั้น 2): 229 districts, 1 minor district

Level 3 districts (อำเภอชั้น 3): 220 districts, 6 minor districts

Level 4 districts (อำเภอชั้น 4): 167 districts, 74 minor districts

Though two slides later it lists the criteria, I don't understand them as it only says something about "raw score" and can only guess that its some kind of economic score which is used as the basis for the district level. Only thing I can understand is that the Mueang districts are always either level 1 or special level.

And for the special districts I could find a list in a document which looks like the answer sheet to a entrance test for officers in the local administration. According to that file, the special districts are the following:

The minor district (King Amphoe) was created in 1907 as a subordinate of Mae Prik district, the present-day district Mae Suai. It was upgraded to a full district in 1932.

However the Royal Gazette announcements dealing with Wiang Pa Pao suggest a totally different turn of events. At first, in 1905 Khwaeng Mueang Wiang Pa Pao (แขวงเมืองเวียงป่าเป้า) and Khwaeng Mueang Phong (แขวงเมืองพง) get merged to Khwaeng Mae Suai (แขวงแม่ซวย) - at that time the districts in northern Siam were called Khwaeng, the name Amphoe was introduced country-wide later. In 1907 King Khwaeng Wiang Pa Pao (กิ่งแขวงเวียงเป้า) was upgraded to a Khwaeng. Those few announcements between 1907 and 1932 never again use word "King" to designate it being a minor district.

However this all about the early history of Wiang Pa Pao I was able to find in the gazette, so I can only presume that the minor district existed already in 1905 and was another case where it had a minor district for the central part of a district. I really wonder how amphoe.com came to their version of the history, the only thing which seems to be correct is the year 1907, but not as the creation of a minor district but the creation of a full district. Also, I have no source suggesting that Mae Suai was named Mae Phrik in past, there's only a subdistrict named Mae Phrik right next to Mae Suai. The only change about the name of Mae Suai was the spelling, in the announcement on its creation it was spelled แม่ซวย, but already in 1917 the modern spelling แม่สรวย was used.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

The idea of solving the problem with the insurgency in three southern-most Muslim-dominated provinces by giving the area some kind of autonomy has made it into the main news again this week, after opposition leader Chavalit Yongchaiyudh publicly proposed this approach.

Puea Thai Party chairman Chavalit Yongchaiyudh is proposing the establishment of a special administrative area comprising the three troubled provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.
The former prime minister said he would put forward the idea at meetings with local leaders during his trip to the far South, which begins tomorrow.
[...]
He was proposing the three provinces form a self-administration area. As in other special administrative areas, legislation would have to be passed to enable it, he said.
Bangkok Post, November 2 2009, Chavalit pushing special zone for South

However as usual the articles around this issue fail to deliver to tell what is actualy meant by this "autonomy", which responsibilities of the central administration should be transferred to the newly created body. It somehow seems that since some of the articles call about a "Pattani city" it means something modeled after the central administrative zone Bangkok, where the elected administration has many of the responsibilities otherwise in the hands of the centrally appointed provincial administration. A small quote from another article indicates that Chavalit thinks about more decentralization

On Tuesday, Gen Chavalit defended his "Pattani City" model, saying that all he meant was a form of local government not an independent Pattani state, as it was being interpreted by the government. (Bangkok Post, November 4)

I don't know whether the decentralization of the second half of the 1990s with the creation of the TAO, new tasks for the PAO, upgrade of the sanitary districts to municipalities did fulfill the expectations, but continuing the decentralization at province level only in the deep south does not make sense for me, why shouldn't the other parts of the country not deserve elected province governors or a really powerful provincial parliament instead of the weak PAO.

The central point of the very recommended book Tearing apart the land : Islam and legitimacy in Southern Thailand by Duncan McCargo is that the insurgency is mostly caused by a lack of legitimacy of the administration, so a decentralization may help. But why the previous steps of decentralization did not prevent the violence to erupt after many years of relative peace.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

While adding some of the administrative villages into my XML files from the websites of the Tambon administrative organizations (TAO), in some cases I noticed that the lists include some kind of village status or type. Sadly I don't know the details for any of these, but they all seem to be centered around development funding to improve the infrastructure.

Don Sai subdistrict (ตำบลดอนทราย), Khuan Khanun district, Phatthalung province on the data page adds either a (กม. - KM) or a (อพป. - OPB) behind the village name. Six of the villages are labeled KM, another 5 with OPB. I could find that OPB stands for อาสาพัฒนาและป้องกันตนเอง, which translates to village development committee. For KM i found คณะกรรมการ(กลาง)หมู่บ้าน - village (center) committee, not sure whether the กลาง belongs into it or not.

Completely different however are the categories I first found at Mae Phrik (ตำบลแม่พริก), Mae Suai district, Chiang Rai province, where the village list includes หมู่บ้านเร่งรัดพัฒนาอันดับ 2 and 3 (village accelerated development level 2 or 3). Also a level one is used, see the village list of Mae Khaeo (ตำบลแม่ข้าวต้ม), Mueang Chiang Rai district, this has Muban in all three levels.

A funny note showing the quality of journalism in Thailand - via ThaiPhotoBlogs I found a photo from the tabloid newspaper DailyXpress, which allegedly shows an official showing the new license plate. But comparing it with the one show above it is obvious that the official shows the old version with only two Pandas.

For Nakhon Ratchasima previously the graphic only showed Phimai temple, which in the now announced version was made smaller and supplemented with some hills (probably those of Khao Yai national park) and the Chumphon gate (ประตูชุมพล) in Nakhon Ratchasima city.

Monday, November 2, 2009

When I wrote about the reduction of the TAO levels from five to three, maybe the main thing I did not find was a list of all the TAO with their respective level. Now by a Google search for something else I found a PDF with exactly this data at the website of the Ministry Of Interior.

This 191 page PDF has all the TAO as of October 4 2006, including the status (ขนาด), the year of creation, the area and the population (male, female and total). Sadly it seems there is only the PDF, and not a Excel file with the same data, which would be the much more natural way to share such a big table. So it took me quite some work to find a free PDF2Text converter to extract the text, and then make it into a spreadsheet myself. I don't know whether it was something going wrong during this conversion, but neither the area nor the population columns add up to the total values given in the PDF. And also for the three levels there are a few problems, because for 5 entries no level column is left blank, instead of 6272 small (เล็ก) TAO it only has 6271, and instead of 71 large (ใหญ่) only 67, only the 274 of middle (กลาง) level are all present. So one of the following five TAO must be a small one, while the other four must be large.

Whereas Pak Song has already been upgraded to a municipality and therefore probably was a large one, the last entry is the most strange one. At first, in the table it is actually listed as "สภาตําบลบ้านโคก" (Branch Subdistrict Ban Khok), and secondly in my TAO table it only has three TAO in the Ban Khok district - since most area of the subdistrict Ban Khok belonged to the municipality Ban Khok the Tambon Council for the remaining area was abolished in 2004 and added to the municipality. So there simply is no such entity.

But even with these problems, that file is a good source of data, next thing to analyze is which level were the TAO upgraded since the creation of that document, does it have any large or middle TAO left at all?

Changwat, Amphoe, Tambon

Everything about the administrative subdivisions of Thailand - history, current news, facts hardly found in English, reviews of corresponding books, the Wikipedia coverage of these entities...

Feedback of all kind is very welcome, either by public comments at the corresponding posting, or also by private email. Comments only posted to spam or containing anything which might give me legal problems in Thailand will be deleted.